3 min
Fighting Words
March was the first month of the Roman year, partly because the road conditions were finally right for citizens to march out again (pun intended) and fight. The month of March is named, in fact, for Mars the Roman war god. This Word Stories instalment highlights some common English words derived from the history of war.
March
The month of March gets its name from the Roman god of war, Mars. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the arrival of spring heralded the launch of new military campaigns. The Romans accordingly called this time “the month of Mars” (mensis Martius and later just Martius). The same Latin roots can still be seen in other English derivatives like martial (“related to war”). When speakers of Old French adopted the habit of calling March the month “of Mars” (Martius), they palatalized the -ti- sound as -z- to end up with marz. Anglo-Norman pronunciation passed the change down as march, and this is the word form that English speakers adopted in the 12th century. The English verb to march was also later derived from French in the 14th century (from marcher—“to walk”), but it goes back to a different Old French root (marchir—“to trample”). The fact that soldiers march like the Romans did in March is therefore just one of linguistic evolution’s little jokes.
gold-brick
In modern English slang, the verb to gold-brick usually means “to loaf around” or “to avoid work and responsibility”, especially on the part of a lazy person pretending they don’t feel well. The origin of the expression isn’t common knowledge, and one popular folk etymology associates it with the image of lazy bricklayers deliberately working too slowly, giving every brick far too much careful attention (as if they were all made of gold). In fact, the verb ultimately comes from an old money-making scam called “the ‘gold brick’ swindle” (National Police Gazette, 1865), in which con men would coat worthless bricks with gold and pass them off as gold bars. Thanks to the way this confidence trick captured the public imagination, people began using the phrase a gold brick to mean “a fraud” or “something too good to be true” (The Observer, 1888), and to gold-brick somebody meant to scam them (Times and Register, 1893).
Both of these latter meanings survive in English today, but in the early 20th century, American soldiers took gold-brick in a new direction by using it as a noun meaning “a worthless person” (The Washington Post, 1905), especially one accused of being lazy and dishonest (L. H. Nason, Chevrons, 1926). Presumably, the connection with the older sense of gold-bricking was intended to paint the target as the kind of deadbeat who would rather scam people than do honest work. In any case, to gold-brick a job in the army soon meant by extension to “shirk” it (Stars and Stripes, 1918). This last usage is the one that ended up taking root most successfully in modern English slang, in the form of the intransitive verb to gold-brick (“to shirk responsibility” or “to slack off”).
jingoism
The noun jingoism and the adjective jingoistic connote an excessive, bellicose kind of patriotism. They are not especially old as far as words go, but their story is a colourful one, involving sleight-of-hand magic, a mild bit of blasphemy, and a drinking song. The nonsense word jingo is first attested as part of the phrase high jingo, spoken by 17th-century magicians to make things reappear (J. Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy, 1670). It pops up soon after in the expression By Jingo! (as in P. A. Motteux’s English edition of Pantagruel’s Voyage by François Rabelais, 1694), which is often explained as a “minced oath” with Jingo standing in for Jesus the same way Jeepers sometimes might. This latter usage is the one that eventually led to the association with chauvinistic politics.
In the late 1870s, jingo became a noun in English when British patriots who supported a hardline policy against Russia came to be associated with a two-fisted patriotic song that contained the oath by Jingo. G. J. Holyoake thus refers in the Daily Mail (1878) to “Jingoes—the new tribe of music hall patriots who sing the jingo song”. The patriotic popular song in question (which is still often just called “the Jingo song”) was composed by G. W. Hunt, and the line that inspired the names of both song and singers went like this:
We don’t want to fight, yet by Jingo! if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too.
The noun jingoism was coined the same year to refer to the same British movement (A. Hayward, Correspondence, 1878), and was soon applied to describe political chauvinism in general (Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1881). The adjectival form jingoistic followed soon after (The Spectator, 1885), carrying the same wider sense of bigoted nationalism that is still associated with these words today.
